A Culinary Calm

I have been feeling like I have been in a bit of a cooking lull lately. My last few meals have been awful, I have been ordering take-out more, and my dietary habits are just abysmal. Over the last several weeks, I have developed the most unhealthy obsession with Baked Cheetos – not a proper snack whatsoever! Admittedly, the marketing is by far the most appealing aspect of the snack (Baked, not fried in a vat of nuclear waste), but why my sudden disinterest in good, tasty, and healthy food? Why the culinary calm?

To illustrate this hiatus, or perhaps minor inattentiveness, about a week ago, I decided to make a pasta dish using some aging red peppers I had in my fridge. Surprisingly, unlike cheese or wine, red peppers do not get better with age… But, committed to using them, rather than wasting them, I found a pasta recipe that called for red peppers, Fontina cheese, an assortment of wild mushrooms (porcini, oyster and cremini mushrooms) and marjoram. As an aside, oyster mushrooms are by far one of the most disgusting fungi I have ever eaten. With a taste that resembles something between sour milk and an old sink sponge, I am just not sure what role oyster mushrooms play on the food stage, or, in the very least, this pasta dish.

Anyway, so after assembling all the ingredients, including the wheelbarrow size portion of Fontina cheese, a dash too much of marjoram and the nasty oyster mushrooms (all the while thinking that there was nothing wrong with this combination), George and I sat down for what could have been our last supper. And with this Biblical reference, I only mean that we prayed we would survive the dining experience. This pasta dish was awful, my cooking was awful and the smell in the apartment was awful.

Since this experience, along with a few other unremarkable dinners, I have been a little kitchen shy. In the last few weeks I have resorted to Baked Cheetos, processed food and a bad attitude. Believing that a good diet is directly related to a good attitude (certainly medication helps too); I need to immediately reverse this culinary lull because I fear that I am falling into a bit of a gastro-depression. As an intervention is desperately needed, and knowing that only I can perform such an intervention, I am pledging that as of today, I am on the Baked Cheetos wagon and back off the (attentive) cooking wagon. Let's also hope that this little culinary hiatus was just the calm before the storm of great cooking to come!

Until next time…